February 6, 2006

Are We Really at War With All Islam?

(I will also post this piece as the first returning column of the Lizard's Tongue, which I had previously allowed to languish.)

A number of commenters here and at other blogsites, as well as some bloggers and even a few talk-show hosts, have claimed that we are "at war with Islam." Sometimes they get sneaky, claiming that all Islam is at war with the West, as if every Moslem, whatever his nationality, secretly yearned for a sharia-ridden world run by a Grand Caliph.

Besides being an obvious variation on the antisemitic canard that all American Jews have "divided loyalties," this claim is functionally equivalent to saying we're at war (or should be) with all Islam. It's a cute dodge, but it amounts to the same thing.

Hugh Hewitt makes an impassioned argument that we're not at war with all of Islam, as does the administration. Not even Ann Coulter has called for such an Armageddon against a whole religion worldwide. Big Lizards certainly agrees with the Hewitt-Bush side of this argument (that is our bias); but we do not do so thoughtlessly, rather after thinking long and hard about it.

But what exactly would it mean to be "at war with Islam" anyway? Let's really take a look.

The proponents of this position clearly mean we should be at war with Islam in the same way we were at war with Nazi Germany: that is, I have never heard anyone both call for a war against all Islam -- and then suggest that the war should be a limited war; anyone calling for the first is calling for a total war, a kulturkampf, Armageddon.

So I will assume throughout, until the end, that this is the meaning of "at war with Islam." At the end, I'll poke around a bit about the possibility of a "limited" war with all Islam. Until then, we assume we're talking about war with Islam the way we were at war with Germany in World War II.

Targeting

During WWII, warfare was fought on both sides with a complete disregard for civilian deaths; we have the German attack on Guernica, but we also have the British and American attack (mostly British) on Dresden. But contemporary warfare -- post Geneva Conventions -- requires countries waging war to avoid deliberately targeting civilian populations, and I assume this would continue.

But contemporary warfare certainly sanctions the ancillary deaths of civilians in attacks clearly aimed at military and political targets. So the question arises -- what would we target?

Obviously any terrorist bases would be legitimate targets. But when fighting a nation in a total war, we're certainly not restricted to only attacking irregulars! We're allowed to attack regular army units... therefore, we would in this scenario be allowed (and encouraged) to attack any military target of any Moslem country anywhere in the world, even a military that has not previously participated in any warfare against us (just as we could attack units of the Wehrmacht that had not yet engaged in any combat).

Similarly, political and industrial targets are fair game in total war; that's pretty much part of the definition of total war. Therefore, proponents of this position claim we have the right to attack any factory, any railway or airport, any port, any highway, any dam, or indeed, any highrise office building anywhere in any majority-Moslem country, as well as every government building.

Since most Moslem countries mandate Islam as the state religion, making Islam a part of the government, that would extend to every mosque or madras anywhere in any Moslem country. This is especially true because militant Islamists very commonly use mosques as military bases: plotting attacks from mosques, retreating to mosques, and even storing munitions and WMD in mosques. Thus, no mosque can be assumed to be entirely civilian, and most proponents of the "war against all Islam" position typically make it explicit that every mosque is a possible target.

Finally, even in countries that were nominally not allied with Germany, we certainly held during WWII that we had the authority to attack German sympathizers who might be working to sabotage the friendly nations. We did this with or without the help or even acquiescence of the governments of those countries on a "military necessity" basis.

Therefore, inherent in the definition of total war, if we were "at war with Islam," we would quite literally be claiming the authority to attack any majority-Moslem nation anywhere in the world, or any Moslem population within a non-Moslem nation, including any economic, political, or Moslem-religious building, place, or entity, with or without specific provocation, and with lethal intent.

Tactics

In total war, a nation uses its entire military and economic might to reduce the enemy. Thus, certainly there would be no restriction on using our most powerful munitions -- including nuclear weapons -- in this war. (As we refrained from using either poison gas or biological warfare even during WWII, I will assume those same restrictions would apply in the war against all of Islam.)

However, we certainly would be allowed to use flame throwers, tanks, bombs of any size, extensive mining of roads and areas that might be used by Moslems, defoliation, cluster bombs, airdropped Napalm and white phosphorus, the destruction of dams upstream from large population centers (such as the Aswan High and Low Dams in Egypt, which would threaten the lives of 70 million people who live within a dozen miles of one or the other), the destruction of nuclear power plants (regardless of any radioactive danger to surrounding civilian populations), and the firebombing of crops that could result in mass starvation.

Ordinarily, we would avoid attacking hospitals or Red Crescent centers, personnel, or vehicles; but Islamic jihadis have a history of using such facilities for military purposes (transporting terrorists inside a Red Crescent or even Red Cross ambulance, for example), and I doubt that a country committed to total war against all Islam could be prevented from targeting medical facilities that were suspected of also being military sites.

In total war, everything goes except that which is specifically forbidden by treaty.

Executing prisoners was not particularly uncommon during WWII, particularly during the liberation of the Nazi death camps. When passions among our soldiers ran high, they would sometimes simply machine-gun the SS death-camp guards -- or indeed any nearby German unit that was mistaken for death-camp guards. While officers would typically try to stop such massacres, the soldiers involved were not significantly punished. After all, there was a war on.

Presumably then, with this precedent, persons suspected of particularly vicious attacks who were captured in battle would be subject to mass extermination -- either legally or simply as a fact on the ground.

As "de-Nazification" followed whenever we liberated a country from the Nazis, presumably the American military would have to "de-Islamicize" all captured territories, making the religion of Islam illegal and enforcing the prohibition with punishment from imprisonment up to and including execution. We would need to be on the lookout for, e.g., ostensibly Christian or Jewish sects that were in fact covertly Islamic; the military authorities would need to maintain up-to-date lists of all acceptable religions, and they would have to have the power to question any person about his religious beliefs and arrest him if those beliefs were suspect.

As captured Germans were pressured to turn against their earlier comrades, so presumably would the advocates of the "war against Islam" proposal urge that captured Moslems be encouraged or threatened into going back into communities of secret Moslems and turning them in to American authorities to be rounded up like the rest.

"Fifth columnists" are fair game in total war; indeed, in the 1940s, we rounded up about 75 thousand Americans of Japanese descent (and 45 thousand Japanese nationals) merely on the possibility they might turn out to be fifth columnists. Therefore, we would be justified, indeed compelled, under this war-against-all-Islam doctrine to close all American mosques and round up all 3 million or so Moslems in the United States. The Constitution would be suspended in this instance (as it was in 1943 in the Supreme Court decisions in Yasui v. United States, Hirabayashi v. United States, and Korematsu v. United States).

We would need to build vast War Relocation Camps (concentration camps) to warehouse all these people. As the war could take decades, many of these people would live their entire lives in these camps, as would their children and grandchildren. They would have to be more or less permanent "Moslem zones," with people only being allowed to leave if they formally converted to some other religion -- as determined by the American government.

Victory Conditions

In 1945, Germany formally and unconditionally surrendered to the Allies (we insisted that the surrender be unconditional); later that same year, so did Imperial Japan. But those were each single political entities that could, in fact, designate persons authorized to sign such surrender documents.

Islam is a religion, not a single political entity. Moreover, unlike Catholicism, Islam does not even have one recognized caliph who could speak for all Moslems... so "Islam," as an entity, cannot surrender.

Therefore we would presumably be forced to continue fighting until all possible resistance was destroyed. That means every city leveled, every population reduced, every industrial or economic base ruined or captured, every pocket of Moslems ferreted out and either destroyed or otherwise neutralized, all resistance crushed, all mosques in the world either destroyed or at least monitored constantly, all transportation restricted, and concentration camps built to contain hundreds of millions of "enemy soldiers" pretty much from here to eternity.

We would require American hegemony over the entire world, in the manner of the Roman Empire (or perhaps the Spanish colonial period of 1500 to 1800), with constant spying on everyone to ensure no rebellion was being plotted. The military would by and large be in charge of most enforcement on the ground, as it always is in such empires, even if there is nominal civilian control of the military. The president's role as commander in chief would trump his role as chief executive officer in such a state.

Then we could declare victory.

Consequences

For the hardy souls who have made it this far, it should be pretty clear that the consequences of honestly declaring war on all of Islam even in victory would be dire: America would cease to exist as we know her today; we would instead have something akin to a combination of Roman Empire and Nazi America, but with the venom against Jews replaced by venom against Moslems.

There would be so many executions, we would have to have special sites set up for round-the-clock extermination of people who refused to convert from Islam to some other religion. As none of our historic allies would likely join in such a crusade, America, in order to conquer all of Islam, would have to first conquer all the world to impose pax Americana.

Freedom of religion would be one of the first things to go, as every person in the world -- including every American -- would have to prove again and again that his religion was acceptable to the military authorities. Of course the rest of the Bill of Rights would also be gone.

The Soviet gulags would be replaced by American counterparts. Millions would be wrongly suspected of Moslem sympathies and would lose jobs, children, and perhaps even their liberty. Children would have to be raised by the government to ensure there was no backsliding on such dangerous subjects as religion and rights.

In trying to rid the world of Moslems, we would have rid ourselves of our own souls; that is the first and worst consequence of making war upon an entire religion.

Total War Lite: the Limited Version of the War on All Islam

There is a good reason that proponents of the "war against Islam" don't accept the idea of it being a limited war, and that is because limited wars typically end only two ways, especially against entire cultures: either in escalation to total war -- or in defeat.

It's hard even in theory to imagine how one could have a limited war against something as large, entrenched, and ubiquitous as a religion; it would be worse than saying we're going to fight Nazi Germany -- but only particular battalions, leaving other battalions unmolested.

And even if we began to fight it as a limited war, the natural consequence to America attacking non-terrorist Islamic countries simply because they were run by Moslems would be for other Moslems themselves to escalate attacks. Heck, they already do that to some extent even when we are clear in word and deed that we're only attacking terrorists!

So for those reasons, I believe that a "limited war against all Islam" is a non-starter and need not be extensively analyzed.

Conclusion

For all these reasons, I draw several conclusions:

The consequences of attempting to eradicate not just militant or terrorist sects of Islam but Islam itself from the world would be awful and dire were we to win -- and unthinkable were we to lose.

We have neither the might nor the means to carry such a total war on Islam to victory.

Americans would not stand for it unless we had already suffered an attack so catastrophic that our entire national character were changed; and if we had, we would have even less might and means to carry out such a program.

None of our allies would stand with us in such a total war on all Islam.

Even if we somehow managed to win the war, we could not keep the peace.

An America that would seriously contemplate such a program would be an America unrecongizable to anyone reading these words.

And finally,

Those people advocating such a proposal -- a war against all Islam, a clash of West vs. East, the final Armageddon of Christianity against Islam -- have not actually thought it through, or are incapable of understanding the consequences, or are simply bleating for effect... and in any event are fundamentally unserious people who cannot distinguish between a Moslem who believes in democracy (of which there are millions in this country alone) and a Moslem who believes in tyranny.

That is, anyone who advocates such a course, even for effect, is a mindless bigot who should be shunned by all persons actually serious about winning the real war: the war against terroristic jihadism, militant Islamism, or Islamofascism, whatever one chooses to call it... not against "all Islam."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 6, 2006, at the time of 6:19 PM

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» Are We Really at War With All Islam? from On The Third Hand
I certainly hope not. Dafydd ab Hugh points out what we would have to do to win such a war. In (verbally) graphic detail. Note that he thinks the proponents of the "at war with all Islam" side do want a military war - like WWII (I agree, from what ... [Read More]

Tracked on February 7, 2006 3:31 PM

Comments

The following hissed in response by: Mr. Michael

I suppose that as a people we do need to be occasionally beaten silly with a Clue Stick... and Dafydd, you certainly have given us a useful bat to swing around.

It seems that the idea of "War" has been diluted for so many years, that in rhetoric we as a Nation (Speaking only for my own, the U.S.) have neglected to consider what War really entails. Thank you for laying out such a detailed reminder. I've never thought that we either were or should be at war with all Islam... but I recognize that the Islamists ("terrorists and those who help or protect them" ~definition by G.W. Bush) have declared War against the U.S. To ignore THAT would be as irresponsible as declaring War on all Islam.

I've never thought that we either were or should be at war with all Islam... but I recognize that the Islamists ("terrorists and those who help or protect them" ~definition by G.W. Bush) have declared War against the U.S. To ignore THAT would be as irresponsible as declaring War on all Islam.

The term "Islamists" may be incorrect when referring to the terrorists spawned of radical Islam. Bush called it Islamic Radicalism. I'm inclined to think "Islamists" refers to those who want a government of strict Islamic code; When Daniel Pipes says that Islamists have won the Iraqi election I don't think he means the terrorists have won.

The above hissed in response by: justphishing at February 7, 2006 7:08 AM

The following hissed in response by: Portia

There are some holes in the scenario. NOT that I advocate total war, but as a matter of "future world building" I should point out you're making a few assumptions.

First -- you make an assumption that there would be some form of crypto muslims after defeat. This is unlikely. I don't know WHY -- perhaps because of peculiarities of a religion that was always spread at sword point -- but as far as I can tell from history, Islam disappears when states or even communities turn against it. In Spain and Portugal you can still find crypto Judaism in action (some families being too paranoid to declare themselves even now.) THERE IS NO evidence of crypto islamism. There are families with clear islamic names, but no practice of the religion going on underground, as it were.

The other -- and part of the religion's ingrained triumphalism and active militarism (as opposed to militantism, if that's a word, which is normal to ALL religions) -- is that there is a good chance an offensive against Mecca itself, the razing of the city and rendering it inhabitable in some way would cause the religion to disappear. Because so much of their belief is tied in with Mecca's physical real-estate.

NOW I AM NOT PROPOSING ANY OF THIS. Okay. Sometimes when I'm grumpy. But since I only propose it to the cats, it's not really serious. (Cats would detonate nuclear weapons, of course, if they could get hold of them. Given lack of opposable thumbs, though, we're safe for now.)

Again -- this is just as a "it might be simpler than you think" not a suggestion.

OTOH what you suggest -- the full nightmare scenario -- is a possibility -- some days I think a probability and not that far off -- for our future. How? Well, if we let Iran continue to screw around, if we pursue a policy of half-hearted intelligence, if we continue having great fun with our infighting and one upmanship to the point where radical muslims are encouraged to think us so weak they detonate a nuclear weapon in the US with significant casualties. Say, they take out NY, or DC, or even Atlanta or Boston. By the next day America will be, if not in name, a defacto military empire. We will win -- I've seen the rest of the world's military and defensive capability and I'm not impressed -- but when we are done we will not be ourselves. And the world left behind, however materialy pleasant, will be a thing of nightmare.

THIS is why I -- whom am a Libertarian and quite averse to state-pursued wars of any sort -- must endorse the war we're in and wish our State Department and most of the party that shall not be named would stop playing silly buggers and publicly encouraging the enemy.

P.

The above hissed in response by: Portia at February 7, 2006 10:48 AM

The following hissed in response by: SDN

Dafydd,

You have started from an incorrect set of assumptions, and therefore have reached an incorrect conclusion.

You have confused a war against a nation-state with a war against an ideology. We had a war with Fascism (in Europe) / militarism (in Japan). It did not require us to kill every member of the populations of the actively belligerent countries, or every country run by those ideologies (Spain, forex). What it did require is to visit such widespread destruction on the countries that both espoused the ideology and attacked their neighbors that the holders of the ideology had to ask themselves two questions: 1. Is there any other outcome other than death and ruin for the hostile action, and 2. Do I really believe that strongly in this? People espousing these ideologies are still around today. They can still do horrible things. They don't take over governments and attack the US because their fellow citizens aren't convinced the cost is worth the benefits.

2. I agree that with the level of attacks we are suffering today the necessary war will not be fought. The US wasn't going to fight WWII until not just one attack, at Pearl Harbor, but a whole series of defeats were inflicted on us and our Allies in Dec 1941 / early 1942.

3. There is a reason why WWII was the last major war to achieve its' goals: it was the last war fought with the necessary ruthlessness. War is an ugly business. Once you have decided that it is necessary to fight one, any talk of limits is simply silly. The ultimate objective of a war is to convince the enemy that it is easier, cheaper, better to give you what you want. The means are killing and breaking things until the enemy believes that.

4. If Islamists want to stay home and fulminate about the Great Satan, then I don't care. Attack my fellow citizens, fly planes into the buildings in my country, etc., and I'll support as much killing as necessary to convince them this is A BAD IDEA. If that makes me a bigot, I've been called worse.

The above hissed in response by: SDN at February 7, 2006 10:51 AM

The following hissed in response by: Linh_My

SDN

"3. There is a reason why WWII was the last major war to achieve its' goals: it was the last war fought with the necessary ruthlessness. War is an ugly business. Once you have decided that it is necessary to fight one, any talk of limits is simply silly. The ultimate objective of a war is to convince the enemy that it is easier, cheaper, better to give you what you want. The means are killing and breaking things until the enemy believes that."

Shortly after 9/11, both Colin Powel and Madaline Albright BOTH called for eliminating those responsible for 9/11 "root and branch" or in Powell's probably more accurate translation "branch and root."

To anyone with any understanding of the history of civilization these phrases form the Roman Empire have a VERY specific meaning. Hopefully, we will not have to kill the parents, siblings and desendants of everyone involved. But, that is what BOTH Madline Albright and Colin Powell's statements called for.

Might I suggest the term 'muharibun' for them. Might as well use their own words, whose meaning they can't slant as easily. Also suggest using the term hariba (unholy war, war against society, or terrorism would all be good translations) instead, or along with, terrorism.

It would be a great term, except that it has one terrible flaw that spoils everything: it's in Arabic, and the vast majority of us here do not speak Arabic!

We must use a term that is either in English or else is a hybrid of English and some Arabic terms that have, of necessity, gotten into widespread use in the language, such as "jihad" or "fatwa."

I personally prefer "militant Islamism": Islamism to distinguish it from mere Islam, and militant to distinguish the kind we must fight, which was brought to our shores in 1993, and the kind that is merely a spiritual belief with no violent ramifications, such as the Quietism of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Iraq.

(You could equate it to the militant evangelism of the Spanish in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, where conversion was often done at swordpoint, and which differs so markedly from the "quietist" evangelism of many Christians today.)

Thanks for your response. My statement on the use of the word "Islamists" was in response to Mr. Michael and your agreement with him. My statement was more of a phishing exercise because I have been wondering what Daniel Pipes meant when he made the statement about the Iraqi election; that the Islamists won.

On a related issue, I think the cartoon riots are mainstream Islam and related to the Islamic propensity to read conspiracy in many actions of the West. I have seen this propensity with one of my fellow employees; a muslim with a graduated Mechanical Engineering Degree from the University of Michigan.

Justphishing

The above hissed in response by: justphishing at February 7, 2006 6:43 PM

The following hissed in response by: Kathy K

...Arabic terms that have, of necessity, gotten into widespread use in the language, such as "jihad" or "fatwa."

I'm saying that I see a necessity of getting the terms muharibun and hariba into widespread use as well.

We keep hearing about so-called moderates; but here in the UK it is very clear that many of these moderates say one thing in English and something quite different in their native language. (Al Qaradawi being a classic example.)

There are secularist Muslims around; but I do not see a great mass of devout Muslims who are standing against the Islamist loons. They cover for them n their communities, they don't report them to kaffir Police and they condem attempts to arrest/prosecute the radicals.

I believe we are at war; we are at war with whomever wishes to wipe us all off the face of the earth or enslave us in the West (and Israel).

There are secularist Muslims around; but I do not see a great mass of devout Muslims who....

Wait, why do you dismiss the secular Moslems? I would have to say that the vast majority of people in the world who call themselves Christian are actually mostly secular; what percent of people who call themselves Moslem are actually by and large secular?

If it's a significant portion, shouldn't we be trying to recruit those folks, rather than dismissing them as essentially meaningless?

Saying "we are at war with whomever wishes to wipe us all off the face of the earth" is like saying we're at war with whomever we're at war with; it's a tautology. Why not try actually to classify just who we're really fighting?

My wife has several coworkers who are Moslem, and all of them are patriotic Americans who totally oppose all terrorism, especially that done in the name of Islam. One has a brother who is in the CIA, working as a translator (the family is ethnically Iranian from Afghanistan, so they all speak Farsi, Arabic, and Pashtun as natives).

Other examples include, e.g., the brothers who run Iraq the Model. They are not religious in the sense of Moslems who have to write inshallah after every paragraph or who talk more about what happened at mosque the other day than what happened at the office.

I think the right half of the blogosphere dismisses these sorts of Moslems far too readily. It may be because right-wingers are more likely to "live their faith," and therefore they have nothing but contempt for people whose faith is tepid... even with Islam, where living one's faith often means applauding or at least accepting atrocities done in its name.

This is more or less what I meant by my tongue-in-cheek phrase "Moslem Methodists." I don't mean that Methodists can't be devout, only that one doesn't usually think of a Methodist having an evangelical fervor.

If one's faith is creative and constructive, then living one's faith is good for the world; but if one's faith is inherently destructive -- if one's faith is not what Dennis Prager calls an "ethical monotheism," a belief in one God whose primary command is that we behave decently towards one another -- then I think it's best if one does not live one's faith with the fervor of a saint.

(It would be a bit thick to demand that all moderate Moslems convert to Christianity before they can be accepted as decent human beings. It also wouldn't work, and it would drive away natural allies in the war against jihadi terrorism.)

When I discussed this earlier, I pretty much got chewed out by some readers who insisted that all faiths must be lived with burning intensity, or they weren't real.

I agree that we can't lump all Moslems into one basket, however I also see a large population of Moslims who are anti-West. And I believe the core of the anti-west hate is belief in an American/Israeli conspiracy against them.

The above hissed in response by: justphishing at February 8, 2006 3:14 PM

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